#616 – Amazon Seller Black Friday Strategies

Join us in this episode, as we unpack actionable strategies to amplify your sales during Black Friday, Cyber Week, and throughout the bustling Q4. Listen in as we glean insights from over 13 seasoned e-commerce sellers who share their top tactics for success during Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and beyond. Discover quick-hitting tips like incorporating festive elements into product images and crafting high-quality videos to boost conversion rates. We’ll also explore creative promotional events such as a five-day Black Friday series with unique daily offers and the significance of leveraging various holidays for marketing opportunities. These actionable strategies aim to help you transform every day of Q4 into a sales triumph.

The episode further explores methods for Amazon ranking success, where we highlight the importance of coupon codes and strategic advertising budget adjustments to optimize visibility and conversions. With insights into Amazon’s Lightning Deals and seven-day deals, we dive into the power of long-tail keywords and the impact of Amazon Marketing Cloud on customer journey tracking. Additionally, learn about the efficacy of sponsored display ads and retargeting strategies, emphasizing the importance of building audiences of high-intent shoppers. We’ll also discuss how to optimize search query strategies using brand analytics and past performance data for a successful Black Friday. Tune in to equip yourself with a comprehensive toolkit for boosting your sales performance during the holiday season.

In episode 616 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, we talk about:

• 00:00 – Amazon Strategies for Black Friday & Cyber Week Success
• 01:58 – Maximizing Conversion Rate With Sponsored Videos
• 04:48 – Holiday Marketing Opportunities
• 10:42 – Optimizing Listings for Black Friday
• 12:17 – Strategies for Amazon Ranking Success
• 18:01 – Effectiveness of Sponsored Brand Ads
• 18:29 – Effective Strategies for Black Friday Success
• 23:11 – Strategic Brand Analytics for Black Friday
• 25:34 – Profitable Marketing Strategies for Excessive Inventory

Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

Are you ready for Black Friday and Cyber Monday? We interviewed over 15 sellers to get their top strategies for getting the most sales possible during Cyber Week and Q4. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think.

Bradley Sutton:

Hello, everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I am your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that’s completely BS-free, unscripted and unrehearsed. Organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world, and today we have tons and tons of quick-hitting strategies. We actually did a live seven-hour broadcast of top sellers from around the world who have had anywhere from five to 10 to even 15 Black Fridays under their belt. Ask them. You know what were some cool things that happened, some bad things that happened and also what were some of the top strategies here. So what we did is we picked some of the best strategies here to compile for you so that you guys can maybe take some notes and get something that you can implement this year so that you can crush cyber week. So let’s go ahead and get into the clips of these top strategies.

Clarence Cheang:

A very quick one will be just change up the images, make it more festive. You know, especially during this holiday season, I classify most products into two different categories giftable and non-giftable. Right, so, especially if you’re selling in a very giftable category think of tumblers, like gifts for moms, dads, etc. right, maybe it’s good to add a little ribbon, right in your main image. So just to show people on the main image especially that this is a gift. And when we do that, it does signify a lot of shopping behavior for people to buy for their friends or families. So that’s a very simple tip. Add a ribbon in your main image and people get some festive shopping going.

Ash Rex:

So you can put a lot of thought into making a ridiculously high quality video to maximize your conversion rate and then, once you’ve got that down pat, you can test out an enormous amount of video in sponsored brand video ads and really refine what video works. Well, you can target your categories, you can target all your different keywords, you can target all your competitors and then you know if you want to go further, you can make. You can make video ads for each keyword, depending on what people search for. That’s the video you make. You can even make videos targeting your competitors. I’m doing a hot source in Japan which we’re about to launch in America. Within three weeks we will rank the number two hot source in Amazon with video strategies and our number one target is Tabasco. So, we just drowned Tabasco and Nvidia.

Kevin King:

I have a calendar business and a collectibles business you know baseball cards and calendars and that kind of stuff and we used to do a whole series of promotions, a five-day Black Friday event. This is before Amazon was doing anything or any of this other stuff existed. And I would do on the Wednesday before I would do like a warm-up, like a little promotion. I’d sit like five different promotions from Wednesday to Monday and every day there was a different promotion. So maybe Wednesday was the really light promotions 10% off or something like that, cause a lot of people are traveling that day. You don’t get a lot of activity, but just kind of the warmup. And then Thursday would be like all right, after you. It’d be like the turkey discount. I give them, I give them special names Like um, you know, I forget the exact names it would be some sort of like the turkey gobbler discount and gobble up. Uh, you know, five calendars for the price of two, or something like that, um. And then I would do something on Friday which would be the actual Black Friday and that would be one of the better deals. And then Saturday and then Sunday and then Monday. So I guess that’s actually six days. So it will be a six day event and everyday a different offer and they will expire at midnight that day. So there will be an email on my list and back then I was actually dragging email as well on my list . So I’d send out something on like the Monday, uh, Friday before. Uh, because when you could do bulk mail, you could put it in first class and on Friday drop it at the post office. I was dropping off 50,000 postcards. They were getting people’s mailboxes Monday and Tuesday so they’re just in time to hit them and go. Oh yeah, I need to log on. That way if they didn’t see the email or they could prepare for it and plan their schedule, and then I would always do a big promotion. I remember one time I did another promotion for a calendar deal. I sent it out on that Friday I think it’s yeah Friday and people were getting it on Monday and Tuesday by first class mail and by that next Friday I remember going to the post office, which was Black Friday, and from that postcard I’d sent one week earlier I opened the mailbox and there’s $36,000 in there in checks and money orders, just off a little postcard where people writing checks, putting checks in money orders and envelopes and sending it in. So yeah, it’s a, it’s a major thing that.

Kevin King:

But the thing I think that is important to remember is it’s great to do stuff around holidays, and I do it around other holidays too, you know. You can do it on Boss’s Day or Secretary’s Day or Grandfather’s Day. You can do all these different holidays. You can always create an event and in marketing, people are always looking for a justification to buy something when it’s a holiday. So if you piggyback on that not just Cyber Monday, but any other holidays coming up in the fourth quarter you got other holidays. There’s probably some Jewish holidays in there, I don’t know the exact dates. There’s some other holidays. I know that December 8th is Candles Day in all of Latin America and that’s a big day for the Virgin Mary and all that kind of stuff and they all light candles. If you could do something around that, if you have products that are geared towards the Latin market, you can do a lot of other things besides just those. And remember those days are great, but every day after Cyber Monday is another Cyber Monday during the fourth quarter. So don’t just think you got bunch of everything up into those five days, uh, but it’s great opportunity for sure and you get that ball rolling.

Gonzalo Zamora:

For example, my strategy this year. It will be the same the last year? Uh, and is I start beating hard on making remark? Retargeting campaigns uh, two weeks before cyber. Okay campaigns two weeks before Cyber, so that way I will showing my product several times to the same person. Before today I have no big deals on Cyber 5, 10% coupon, no more than that

Bradley Sutton:

Just time exclusive discount, or just a regular coupon or just a discount, or what are you doing?

Gonzalo Zamora:

It’s regular coupons, and after that I again do add to my cart Brand Tailored Promotion, the abandoned cards and I also do the retargeting. So I again, if you didn’t buy the product, I will show you.

Bradley Sutton:

So then coupon that you had during Black Friday it ends, and then now you turn on like a 10 also for the, the Brand Tailored Promotion. So you’re not allowing them to stack the two coupons right?

Gonzalo Zamora:

no, no, I’m not allowing to stack.

Delaney Del Mundo:

I think, during the event itself, if you have the opportunity and you have maybe a sas rep or maybe you don’t to have a manual deal, that’s always going to be the preference because you get more premium placement on the deals page. If you don’t have that opportunity, then prime exclusive discounts are definitely going to be the way to go. But to Bradley’s point, that lead up and the lead out to the campaign is just as important. That way you’re building your ranking leading into the main event period of t12 and then leading out of it. You’re sustaining your rank better than maybe some of your competitors are doing. But I think, Bradley, from your original question, a lot of what slept on is really some of the organic strategies using Helium 10 and how you’re really putting yourself in the best position to convert from a keyword perspective, because you’ll see a lot of seasonal changes that occur during this time. So if you aren’t diving into tools like Market Tracker, 360, Search Query Performance, Brand Analytics in general, Product Opportunity Explorer, Cerebro, time tracker, like these are all all encompassing strategies that we’re utilizing leading up to these campaigns to make sure that we are on page one for as many non-branded keywords as possible during the main event.

Bradley Sutton:

You want to know what keywords are driving the most sales for listings on Amazon. To do that, you need to know what highly searched for keywords the product is ranking for, maybe at the top of page one. You can actually find that out in seconds by using Helium 10’s keyword research tool, Cerebro. Now, that’s just one of the many, many functions that make this tool my favorite tool in the whole suite, and it’s the most powerful keyword research tool ever created for e-commerce sellers. For more information, go to h10.me/cerebro. Don’t forget to use the Serious Sellers Podcast discount coupon SSP10.

Josh Hadley:

But, with that being said, here’s probably the biggest unlock that we’ve had, Bradley. So we got eaten alive when Amazon started to introduce their long-term storage fee or their aged inventory surcharge right, that came out in April of 2023, right? So we have a lot of seasonal products and we would often say, oh, guess what? We had these Christmas party invitations. They didn’t sell well this year, so what? Keep them in FBA and then we’ll sell them out the following year. Now, up until 2023, it was more profitable to keep them there in FBA rather than have them removed, go to a 3PL, ship them back in, right? And so what? We did so over the last kind of like 18 months. One of the things that we’ve really dug into is we have an internal accounting controller and we have gotten into the nitty gritty details of our accounting and finances and, my goodness, the amount of profit that we have been losing just going to aged inventory surcharges has been monstrous. And so this past Prime Day in April, or sorry, in July we were able to clear out a ton of aged inventory. Same thing with this most recent big Prime Day deals right in October. And so, leading up. So you asked the question, hero SKUs get you know, obviously, a Prime Exclusive discount. Then what do we do with, like, do we launch Prime Exclusive discounts on all of our SKUs? Not necessarily. What we’ll do is we’ll kind of like, leave the middle tier as is, but then we’ll take anything that has aged inventory or anything that’s potentially going to incur aged inventory in the next two to three months, and we will light those up. And we have seen A we move a ton of inventory on those and we’re able to kind of like dodge that or mitigate that AIS fee quite a bit, and so that has really reshaped our financials for this year.

Mansour Norouzi:

For leading to Black Friday, Cyber-Monday. I highly recommend adding 5% 10% coupon and the reason for that was that before Black Friday, the customers this happened for Prime Day as well customers coming to look for the product not necessarily, they are purchasing, but they are browsing for the products they are adding to cart. So biggest mistake that I see actually related to this is, apart from not adding coupon, the brand doesn’t think about increasing their budget. Few days before Black Friday, cyber-Monday, and actually everyone is talking that, oh, you have to bring your budget down because the conversion rate or the unification percentage is low. Interestingly, I was looking at the data today before. So actually, for primed, if Black Friday is the same before the event, a few days before the event, absolutely right, unification percentage goes down. But one thing that goes up is advertising conversion rate. Now why this matters? Because unit session percentage reports for the day of the event. Right, because we know the sales are being reported whenever they are ordered. But in advertising you’re seeing that sales getting attributed to the day that the click was made, to the first click. That is why conversion rate slightly goes up before the event, because the customers who were searching for the product they added to cart during the event they purchased. So the sales goes back to the days pre-event for those customers who were searching.

Mansour Norouzi:

So long story short, I would recommend adding coupon codes before the event plus increasing the budget. We usually recommend up to 20% for two to three days before Black Friday, during the events. From my experience, the Lightning Deal has been the best and you have this for Black Friday. It’s either Monday, if I’m not wrong. You have the seven days deal. So we’re on the seven days deal and lead out what we do, plus we increase the budget right as needed. We recommend 100% increase in budget, but during the day we are monitoring the account. If we need or if we are getting out of budget, we will keep increasing the budget. And after the lead out, again, everyone is talking about the conversion rate is low, but something I have realized after a few tests I need to do more tests on this there are some people that miss out on these types of events. They don’t purchase, they forgot, but these customers, they came back and on Amazon they are looking for the product. If you have a good deal, you could get those customers. So I would recommend after the event, even agile coupon codes. If you want to increase your sales, increase your conversion rate compared to the customers.

Alina Vlaic:

So my strategy is like this I go to Product Opportunity Explorer, either check a few competitors by ASIN or I check, I search one or two main keywords right. Until I find some relevant niches for my product or for competitors and then I transpose it to my product right. So from Product Opportunity Explorer, from every niche when we go to search them, we get like the top 20 to 25 keywords that Amazon sees extremely relevant for that niche. And in my opinion, as a seller and as a on the agency part, what we’ve seen to work in the last years, two years or so is relevancy based. So those keywords, if you ask me, are the Holy Bible of every seller. You need to rank on those keywords that Amazon shows for that niche. Now some of them are easier, like, for example, if we’re talking products like yours right, which are in very small niches, but if we’re talking collagen peptides, like my example was today, or I don’t know what other very competitive niches, it’s going to be very expensive to either launch a product there in that category or improve your rank in order to be on a higher position in BFCM, right? So then what do we do? We go to Helium 10. So we have a list of keywords, right? We remove brand names and all that. Everybody knows that. So we got a main list of keywords. We take that list and go to Helium 10, use Magnet, get long tails for each of those keywords, for each Product Opportunity Explorer keyword. I like to have between five and 10. Seven would be a very good number of long tails.

Bradley Sutton:

You put it in Magnet and then look for the Smart complete or something like that to see what the long version of

Alina Vlaic:

Smart complete, where I use filters. Yes, I put, for example, the keyword in phrases must contain, and then then I manually check everything, you know, and I usually fill a filter with a minimum of 10 sales per keyword, so we don’t look at crazy suggestions and I get seven long tails. Let’s say I get seven long tails for each keyword, for each product opportunity per keyword. Let’s say that main keyword has 50K searches a month or 100K searches a month. That’s going to be very expensive to rank. Now I’m going to have seven keywords with search volume between I don’t know 5,700 to 5,000 search volumes a month. All of them, but all of them, contain the main keyword, the product opportunity keyword, in exact form inside them, right? So it’s collagen powder for women over 50, let’s say, a long tail for collagen peptide powder, right? Okay? So then I do that for all my keywords that I’m focused in from product opportunity explorer and I get a list of, let’s say, 50 keywords that all of them are small to medium and are very easy to rank using PPC, google ads, giveaways, whatever you use, or you combine in a total whole and focus on those, either increase your bids or put them in separate campaigns or, I don’t know, do ranking campaigns or whatever, but on those I’m not touching, I’m not doing anything for the main keyword, which is again hard to move, and then as a snowball effect from all those keywords, the actions combined will have effect on the main keyword and it actually will bring it to a very high position. Sometimes we’ve had a lot of situations for my brands as well clients when I didn’t even have to do one single giveaway or PPC effort to rank the main keyword. It got to top 10 only through this long tail,

Bradley Sutton:

because you’re getting the conversions on the long tail keyword.

Alina Vlaic:

Exactly and the relevance, and all the long tails must be extremely relevant and related and contain the exact form of the keyword inside them.

Matt Altman:

I would say that there’s two things that have really changed for us this year. I would say sponsored products still really dominates a lot of things for us. We’re investing more and more in product targeting within sponsored products. They’ve been just doing extremely well for us the last three, four months. But really the biggest piece that change has kind of come from Amazon Marketing Cloud and how we’re able to run DSP towards lookalike audiences in different segments because of that.

Bradley Sutton:

What would be your suggestion on how they can leverage AMC once it becomes available to them?

Matt Altman:

I mean, for us the biggest thing has been really full funnel tracking. You can see how people are being introduced to your brand and what they’re ultimately converting on. So typically, like you would say, sponsored brand ads or sponsored display don’t have that great of a return. We can now see that like 60% of the people who buy our brand are interacting with a sponsored display or sponsored brand first. So we know that’s important, but they’re ultimately converting on that sponsored product down the line. So it helps you to really gauge where you’re splitting those budgets and how you’re going to optimize your account a little bit differently.

Abe Chomali:

So one of the things that doesn’t get talked enough about is sponsored display and retargeting. If anything, it gets very brief mentions whenever people talk about advertising. But because sponsored display has gotten better and better and better over the years, one of the things we’ve been doing on holiday events that has been working really well is building out retargeting audiences, and the way it works is pretty simple. When you go into sponsored display, you can build an audience of people who have looked at your product and have looked at similar products to yours but have not purchased. Those are all the people who have some amount of interest in your product and they are ripe for being shown your thing again during the holiday event. You build out that audience and you market to exactly those people. They have high intent, they have seen your product or the thing that you sell and they’re ready to purchase. When you do that layered on with a discount for the for the event, it converts really well

Shivali Patel:

So would you say that’s the top strategy that people should look into for this coming season.

Abe Chomali:

It’s going to be the top strategy to that you might not be doing already. If I would have to say what do I recommend to a seller going into their first Black Friday or what somebody who has experience is going to be doing it? It’s actually much more fundamental than that. It’s simply watch your budgets all day. The number one thing that we see is sellers running out of budget with a lot of time left in the day and if you’re not on top of it, if you’re not continually adding, you just lose out on sales opportunities and the way we do it. There is one little tip around that Amazon is challenging to work with on those days because the infer the data they give us is not updated. So you can look at ACOS in the middle of the day and you see it’s probably double what it looks like when you see the real updates the next day or two or three days later. So you can look at things in the middle of the day and be scared to add budget.

Abe Chomali:

The way we work around, that is, by working on TACOS or the total ACOS spend, is accurate to the minute. Anytime you refresh during the day, whatever you see you spent. That is exactly what you spent, even if the sales don’t show yet Sales for the account overall are. Also. You can refresh your app all day long, the correct number keeps being in there. So at any point of the day, if you look at your ad spend and you look at your total sales, the numbers match correctly. And as long as your TACOS is there, you know that your marketing spend is that piece of overall revenue. As long as that number is where you want it to be feel comfortable, adding budget to it. The split the next day might not be what you expect or exactly what you want it to be feel comfortable adding budget to it. The split the next day might not be what you expect or exactly what you want, but at least you have the guidance to feed budgets on.

Leo Segovia:

Yeah, but we’re using a combination of promotions and discounts right now and that is working very well. So I’ve been spending a lot of time on the influencer and affiliate side of the business. So we are obviously like securing that space, ensuring that traffic keeps coming from these external sources. But what is working extremely well right now is stacking a few promos, whether it’s a coupon or a private exclusive discount. So what we are doing that I personally realize is working much better. For us right now to prepare for Black Friday is actually a strategy that is costing us a little bit of money, meaning that we are losing $1, $1. 50. But it’s much cheaper than recruiting a bunch of, for example, influencers that we would have to pay a lot of money for. And the way we’re doing this is by. Well, we sell a product that is about $25. So we’re trying to get the product to be purchased below $10.

Leo Segovia:

And what we realize is that when we discount the product, let’s say we have a 50% coupon plus premium exclusive discount, as long as we can go below the ten dollars, we’re actually being getting featured, and we don’t know exactly where Amazon is featuring us, but most likely like products under ten dollars. So we’re getting a lot more sales. This is now obviously costing us. We’re losing about a dollar fifty per product, but if you think about it, we’re losing about one hundred one hundred fifty dollars a day today because we’re sending about 150 units. But what this is along allowing us to do is to obviously gain um BSR. So we noticed that from 200 in a specific subcategory we went down to uh 36 days just by doing these, and so the goal right now is to gain as much as many badges like Amazon choice or potentially like Best Seller, and this way we can obviously ride the wave just before Black Friday with a couple of good badges on the AC.

Vincenzo Toscano:

Some of the things that I do every year and it works very well for me is Brand Analytics is my best friend for Black Friday, because essentially what I do is I go back in time and see what happened in 2023, 2022. I specifically have a look at my Search Query Performance report and see which were the keywords that drove the best performance for my specific ACN during that specific period of time and then I make sure that’s where my effort goes in terms of PPC and also in making sure that my organic ranking is very healthy in those keywords towards Black Friday, because if last year that’s essentially what drove sales to me, I want to make sure I’m actually positioned there. The data is proving the fact that that’s where the money is. Now that’s where you have to also be doing this very early on, because if I start seeing that certain keywords are the ones that drove most of the sales to my product but my organic ranking is actually not stable or not where it used to be by then that’s where, before Black Friday, a few weeks before, I need to start doing strategies from a PPC perspective, from external traffic perspective, to make sure that position myself organically so when the boom of traffic happens. I am pretty much at a safe position as last year and can replicate the performance. So that’s one thing.

Vincenzo Toscano:

The second thing I do is also with Brand Analytics. You can also have a look at during that specific period of time what was the essential distribution of market share across a specific keyword, so you can see who were the top sellers right, who were getting the main amount of the impression share and the conversion share. And essentially what I do is, if I see consistency of competitors at least two years in the past that they were the one driving most of the market share penetration, I make sure those are heavily targeted on my PPC from my sponsor products, Sponsor display, as in targeting campaigns, and making sure I retarget them. So pretty much if those are the guys that are taking all the traffic and money historically, I make sure this year I pretty much attack them from our front so I can take some of that cut. And the final thing I also do which works very well for us is also I try to do some kind of essentially tailoring of the content right. So, for example, if we do video campaigns and banner campaigns on my PPC, I try to, especially if we’re going towards Christmas or Black Friday I try to emphasize my content more toward a giftable season, right? So, especially if the typical product that maybe you buy for your mom or you buy for your friend X, y and Z, you want to make sure that your product starts to stand out as the product that you should be buying in Q4 and during this giftable season, compared to another product that’s very generic and maybe it’s another me too product, right?

Joe Sanhanga:

I basically tried this as well during Prime Day on the 8th and 9th of October, where we had products that had kind of excessive inventory and we realized that during the normal day some of those campaigns were just at optimum spend. They weren’t really spending as much. So what we did for Prime Day was kind of put them up a little bit more in terms of bids. But I would only recommend this strategy really if it’s a product that is replenishable, that you know has repeat sales. Because what you’re basically trying to do here is get a loss leader and by getting a loss leader you get a new to brand customer and then you know that you’re going to make your money based on the lifetime value. So, for example, we had some stand-up pouches that weren’t moving and what we did for Prime Day is we put those bids up. So we made sure when you search up stand up pouch, you’re going to see our stand up pouches. And then what we did was we put a discount on there for Prime Day and obviously that discount was showing in the industry.

Joe Sanhanga:

Not many people actually utilize discounts because such a low price product. So we were allowed to take, we were happy to take the hit. But that’s because we then calculated that, ok, if we can lose a dollar or two on this product, even though you know the bids are high, we put a discount. Then somebody comes back and buys more packs next month, the month after the month, after their lifetime value then allows us to be profitable. So most people are just trying to get profit and win out the gate and that becomes more difficult. But because now we’ve brought people into our brand through that loss leader, we’ve just used our lifetime value to then get profitable, which we actually saw happen. We got that standard pouch was like a seven by 10 craft pouch. It got a few sales and now we’ve actually started seeing sales just trickle in without the discount and all those people are now some of the repeat sales and obviously it’s working. So that’s one strategy that I did is just making sure if it’s a replenishable product, you can. You can really show up with a good discount to obviously persuade people to get over the line.

Bradley Sutton:

All right guys, hope you enjoyed this episode. Which ones are you going to implement? Let us know in the comments below. Don’t just be like, oh, this was a great episode, I love hearing all these cool things. No, I need you guys to take action. So hopefully you guys pick one, two, three of these strategies that you heard today and you’re going to implement it in a couple of weeks. I’ll see you guys in the next episode.

Enjoy this episode? Be sure to check out our previous episodes for even more content to propel you to Amazon FBA Seller success! And don’t forget to “Like” our Facebook page and subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you listen to our podcast.

Get snippets from all episodes by following us on Instagram at @SeriousSellersPodcast

Want to absolutely start crushing it on Amazon? Here are few carefully curated resources to get you started:

• Freedom Ticket: Taught by Amazon thought leader Kevin King, get A-Z Amazon strategies and techniques for establishing and solidifying your business.
• Helium 10: 30+ software tools to boost your entire sales pipeline from product research to customer communication and Amazon refund automation. Make running a successful Amazon or Walmart business easier with better data and insights. See what our customers have to say.
• Helium 10 Chrome Extension: Verify your Amazon product idea and validate how lucrative it can be with over a dozen data metrics and profitability estimation.
• SellerTrademarks.com: Trademarks are vital for protecting your Amazon brand from hijackers, and sellertrademarks.com provides a streamlined process for helping you get one.